Apocalypses and Other Shattered Things
by herworship429
Summary: "The world doesn't have to end unless you let it." Lincoln goes on the run and gets a little dose of reality.


Post-episode 3.3 speculative drabble... basically, maybe how Lincoln finds his way back to Daisy and SHIELD. Featuring Matt Murdock ordering Russian take-out (is that even a thing?) and giving pep talks, because why not? This isn't really a crossover, I just love the idea of a little of AoS making it's way into the Marvel gritty-verse (that is definitely not a thing).

Usual disclaimers, none of the characters are mine, etc.

Enjoy.

* * *

Disappearing is easier than he thought it would be. Not that he isn't constantly looking over his shoulder, but it helps that he isn't really the kind of guy who gets noticed in a crowd. He learns very quickly that big cities are safer. He stays around college campuses too, if he can help it, because it's easier to blend in there. To the eye of most passersby, he's just another grad student at NYU, or Columbia, or wherever he finds himself. He spends a week loitering around MIT, and then Harvard for a few days. He's not proud of the fact that he's resorted to pick-pocketing and petty theft to survive, but he's too scared he might be recognized if he tries to find a job.

This can't last, and he knows that, but he doesn't know where to go or what to do, so he just gets by as best he can.

* * *

He calls himself Colin if he has to call himself anything. At least he does this time. He's back in New York, where it seemed easiest to disappear into angular streets, dark alleys and shady motels where the security cameras don't work (and if they do, he shorts them out as he walks by). He's started dying his hair dark brown, so sometimes he doesn't recognize his own reflection.

There are a lot of things about himself that he no longer recognizes.

He does his best to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. Which is well and good until one night when he happens upon a mugging in progress; he's paranoid about phones, lest SHIELD or the ATCU find a way to track it, so he can't call the police, and this dark, winding little alley is utterly deserted. Or so he thinks.

The sobbing victim is still watching from the mouth of the alley where he told her to run when he walks away, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, his face shielded from any prying eyes by the hood he'd yanked up before he let the asshole have it. He leaves the hulking brute lying on the pavement, still alive, but with a slack-jaw and glazed-over expression that suggests he probably won't be walking in the next hour. He doesn't realize the woman had pulled out her phone to call 911 and instead managed to film a video of the entire rescue. She posts it online the next day, but by the time SHIELD descends upon the alley, and the girl he'd saved, any clues to what happened that night have long been washed away or forgotten, and Daisy is left standing there on her own, wondering where he'd gone and how to reach him.

But that cell phone camera wasn't the only one watching him that night.

Well. Maybe ' _watching_ ' isn't exactly the right word.

* * *

He finally manages to obtain new fake ID's that actually look the part, so now he is Colin Walker, and he no longer has to resort to pick-pocketing in subway stations. He gets a crappy job washing dishes at a half-decent Russian restaurant. He's pretty sure the place is owned by mobsters, and staffed by criminals, so Marya, the lady who runs the kitchen, doesn't care that he can't provide any kind of proper documentation. He figures he'll fit right in.

He goes to work and then he walks back to the sleazy motel where he lives because he can't afford anything else. Sometimes he goes to the bodega on his block for groceries, though he isn't quite brave enough to actually do much cooking in the riotously disgusting little kitchenette in his room.

Work. Then back to the motel. Then work again. Rinse and repeat. It's incredibly boring.

He's not entirely sure how it happened, but at some point he gets roped into playing chess every Sunday with these three old men at a table at the deli counter of the grocery store. Two of them chatter at each other, and at him, in Spanish, and the other guy is delighted to discover that he speaks Mandarin. He doesn't like the routine, but he does miss talking to people, so he tries not to miss any games. After a while, he starts to pick up both Russian and Spanish before he even realizes it, and when he realizes it, he figures he's got nothing better to do than play chess with a few half-senile old men on Sundays and learn new foreign languages.

He doesn't go looking for trouble. He really doesn't. It's just that it's a bad neighborhood, and he walks to and from the restaurant at odd hours, and some evenings, or in the mornings so early they're still night, he comes across bad people hurting innocent people, and he doesn't think it makes him a hero because he takes issue with that. He's pretty sure the police don't like it. He's heard grumbling about this masked vigilante that beats up mobsters in Hell's Kitchen. He overhears half a conversation one night between one of Marya's bosses and a very menacing cop who he's pretty sure is on mob payroll about it, and is a little bit sick and frightened to hear about how 'the electric freak' is beginning to worry them too.

It doesn't stop him. But then, he isn't actively targeting _anyone_ in particular, much less mob bosses.

He gets really good at hiding his face from well-meaning victims who want to know who saved them. He wants to tell them he isn't _saving_ them. He isn't a hero. He's just a guy trying to get to work. He doesn't say it, though. They wouldn't believe him anyway.

He hears about Spiderman on the news sometimes, but doesn't think much of it, other than to wonder what person in their right mind would actually _invite_ that kind of scrutiny. Besides, the circus operates uptown, mostly, from what he can tell. He makes himself laugh a little imagining what ridiculous name the press would think up for him.

He doesn't know that people are calling him Spark Plug, or that there are little kids in Hell's Kitchen who dress up in hoodies and pretend they can shoot electricity out of their hands. He doesn't know about the lively debates that go down on street corners about who he is now that the ATCU smear campaign has faded. He also doesn't know that his small acts of absentminded kindness, alongside Spiderman's more dramatic and purposeful antics, and the awed whispers about the Devil cleaning up Hell's Kitchen have quietly and inadvertently begun to change the conversation about 'Enhanced humans' and 'alien threats'.

He isn't a hero. But he supposes one could be forgiven for mistaking him for one.

* * *

On the days when Marya's half-delinquent grandson Eddie is in jail, or otherwise unable to tend to his duties as the restaurant's delivery boy, 'Colin' gets upgraded from dishwasher. Three months ago, he might have refused. Now he's fairly sure the government has either given up on finding him, or they've decided that they have bigger fish to fry.

Every now and then, when he's walking around the city, he thinks he sees Daisy. He wonders if she's still trying to find him. If she even still cares. He still doesn't trust SHIELD, but she is all that's left of his old life, and he misses her. There are days when he thinks he sees her and it's all he can do to stop himself from chasing her down and begging her to take him home. Then he remembers that he doesn't have one.

He has a sleazy motel room, and a crappy job, and deliveries to make.

Most of his deliveries go to scary-looking men in gaudy leather jackets, and he tries not to wonder if he's delivering drugs or laundered money, or something else equally illegal. One evening, though, he is summoned to a run-down office building. The peeling sign on the door reads 'Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys at Law'.

A pretty blonde is seated at the desk in front of the door. She is digging in her purse and looks like she's about to leave for the night. She looks up, a little baffled, when he pushes the door open and asks who ordered the take-out.

"I'm sorry, I don't-"

"It's for me," the voice belongs to a man of medium height and build, who is remarkable only in that he's wearing dark lenses (even though the sun has already set) and carrying a cane. He knows that this probably means the man in blind, but he stares as if he could see every single detail in front of him.

"Do you need me to stay?" the blonde's brows furrow in confusion, "I didn't know you were going to stay late."

"It's fine, Karen, you can go," the blind man smiles faintly, "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Okay, if you're sure…" she seems reluctant to leave, but her boss doesn't move from the doorway of his office (or whatever lay beyond the door) until the hall door is firmly shut. Even then, he stands there with his head cocked to one side for almost thirty seconds, almost as if…

"You're listening," the man who calls himself Colin speaks so rarely anymore his voice is always a bit hoarse, no matter how much water he downs. The blind man smiles again and nods.

"You're observant. Most people don't ever stop to wonder how I get around on my own. Not that I haven't been known to play on a pretty girl's sympathies."

He stares uncertainly for a moment, before he realizes this man is a customer and Marya won't be happy with him if he takes too long. As if he can read his mind, the blind lawyer swipes the bag of food from his hands and replaces it with a few bills.

There's something disconcerting about this man. Maybe it's the fact that he doesn't act like he's blind. Whatever it is, he is reminded uncomfortably of a life that no longer exists.

He bolts for the door without even a polite farewell.

* * *

Three days later, he is crouched in a stranger's apartment, over a sofa where a blind lawyer who puts on a mask and beats up mobsters in dark alleys in his spare time is bleeding out and refusing a ride to the hospital. The woman, Claire, just rolls her eyes at that, as if she has heard this argument before and knows the futility of trying to dissuade him.

She is a nurse, and she's obviously done this before, but before he can even stop and think about what he is doing, Dr. Lincoln Campbell makes an unwanted appearance. Claire is startled, but very quickly realizes he knows what he's doing and falls to helping him remove the bullet and sanitize the wound. He leaves her to stitch it up, trying to ignore the fact that they're both staring at him.

"Who are you?" Claire demanded.

"Meet Spark Plug," Murdock manages a cheeky grin, like he knows that nickname will make him angry.

"That new guy? I thought that was just a-" she trails off at the sight of a dim blue glow and a few wheeling sparks around Lincoln's hands. He realizes what's happening and forces himself to calm down. He hasn't lost control like that in a long time.

"Okay…" the nurse shook her head and taped a bandage over Murdock's shoulder, "Not an urban legend."

"I guess the real question is why a doctor who can wield electricity as a weapon is working as a delivery boy at a known mob front."

"Options get limited pretty fast when you're being hunted by the government," he admits in a low voice. It isn't as if he can salvage this life, such as it is, now. He'll have to start over anyway. So he spills the entire damned story, all in one go. He figures they should be prepared for random acts of crazy, just in case any new Inhumans pop up in Hell's Kitchen.

"They're wrong. The papers," he says finally, staring at his hands as if they had sprouted knives, "I'm not a hero. I'm a monster."

"Those are strong words," Murdock says after a long pause, "But one monster to another, you're not so bad. So maybe these aliens wanted living weapons. But they don't get a say now. It's your life, and no matter how many times you tell yourself you're a monster, you keep acting like a good guy. Maybe fate is trying to tell you something."

"I… I just…"

"Let me guess. You had a home. You had a purpose, and you were playing your part, and then something happened that ripped the carpet out from under you," Murdock's voice was distant now, like he was remembering his own trauma, "It felt like the world ended. And you felt like you had nowhere to belong, and no one left to turn to. And maybe you don't. But the world doesn't have to end unless you let it. So stop acting like a ghost. Find a new purpose. Trust me, you'll be happier for it."

* * *

Mack thinks she's lost it. He's started calling her the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. Bobbi tries to be the supportive friend, but Daisy knows when she's getting the sympathy shoulder. Coulson and May aren't afraid to tell her to her face that she needs to get over it. That he's gone, and he wants to be gone, and she should be grateful Coulson's new BFF is leaving it alone at all.

Fitz and Simmons are the only ones who won't tell her to give up on Lincoln. Maybe because Fitz has heard it all before, and he can't blame someone else for doing exactly what he did.

Except Lincoln wasn't lost on an alien planet, and Daisy knows these trips to New York are pointless, but she still goes. She wanders around different Burroughs, but mostly she is drawn towards Hell's Kitchen, because SHIELD is fully aware that someone with electrical powers is playing small-time vigilante there, and she'd bet every penny she has to her name she knows exactly who it is.

She thinks she saw him, once or twice. Later, she convinced herself it was just her imagination.

This time is different. This time, he walks out of an alley, and even though he's been dyeing his hair, and there is something haunted and worn about his face, there is no doubt in her mind.

He even manages a smile.

"I know I can be stubborn," he says it like it's an apology, "But I always come around in the end."

"Yeah?"

"You were right. _I_ was right. We aren't monsters. We aren't weapons. And I could really use a friend again."

She could do a lot of things in that moment, but she just returns his smile.

"Took you long enough."

* * *

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